Posted by Eddie Sylvano on November 25, 2003, at 8:28:38
In reply to Re: What is consciousness? » Eddie Sylvano, posted by Bob on November 24, 2003, at 23:53:36
> So where did you get all that from?
By far the best book has been "Neurodynamics of Personality", as far as scinetific rigor.
Another good one is "The Illusion of Conscious Will".
Beyond these texts, most of my other readings have been in science magazines (Scientific American) and the Internet.
Some neat studies regarding free will were conducted by a guy named Libet, quite a while ago ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?holding=npg&cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=6640273&dopt=Abstract ).
Beyond academic support, the notion just makes sense. If you assume that we have free will, or some special form of consciousness, just keep looking down the evolutionary tree and decide at which point life doesn't have free will (insects?bacteria? virii?). Unless you flatly reject evolution in favor of a religious explaination, it's obvious that we're the result of a process which isn't quite as impressive as we'd like, and bound by the same rules. There is no more place for free will in our behavior than there is for free will in the weather. Both systems are complex and unpredictable, but it's more obvious to people that the weather is the result of physical determinism, because they don't hold the same biases towards it.
poster:Eddie Sylvano
thread:281944
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20031121/msgs/283569.html